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I had an interesting development on Friday. One of the long forgotten stocks in my portfolio (Avis Budget Group) was the subject of a short squeeze and produced a nearly $500k capital gain. I wouldn't rent a car from them, but I'm now proud to be an investor, and when the trade settles on Tuesday an ex-shareholder. (See chart at link.)

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/CAR:NASDAQ?hl...

As some of you know, my policy over my 30+ years of early retirement has been to limit interest and dividend income to the maximum extent possible, while making portfolio withdrawals with capital gains and tax-paid returns of capital. I'm a LTB&H investor who rarely makes a trade and limits investing activity to a couple of hours of tax planning and portfolio rebalancing the last week of the year. Friday's activity was my first stock transaction in eight years.

Of course, there is some cost to this Powerball level win. I've got a large capital gains and 3.8% Medicare surtax to pay and I'll be in the top IRMAA bracket in 2028 paying an extra $600/month in penalties on my Medicare Part B and D premium. But that's fair, there's no reason that middle-class working people should be subsidizing my Medicare insurance.

The lesson here is that even if you have everything on autopilot, it still makes sense to log into your account once or twice a day to detect if you have any large swings in your account value one way or another. Back in 2024, I had a $900,000 ACTS transfer theft that I was able to stop before the money was spirited away to Russia or the Ukraine. And last Friday, a big swing in the positive direction that I was able to act on.

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Congrats on the windfall.

The lesson here is that even if you have everything on autopilot, it still makes sense to log into your account once or twice a day to detect if you have any large swings in your account value one way or another. Back in 2024, I had a $900,000 ACTS transfer theft that I was able to stop before the money was spirited away to Russia or the Ukraine. And last Friday, a big swing in the positive direction that I was able to act on.

We have two factor authentication on money going into or out of our accounts, including transfers. We are texted every time. I also set up a tracking portfolio for all my stocks, just showing 1 share for convenience. All I have to do is log on to SeekingAlpha.com to scope out the movement on all my holdings. With multiple brokerage accounts, I find this one stop checking on holdings easier to do.

YMMV,
IP

It is super easy to set up a portfolio/position watch with a spreadsheet at google sheets. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet

List all your stocks of interest, it updates the price, price change, etc.

Set watch limits, etc. as you wish.

It is much better than the old yahoo portfolio before yahoo crapped it up. When they crapped it up is when I switched to google spreadsheet for my portfolio tracking.

I have multiple accounts at multiple brokers, easy to track everything in one place. Each account has its own tab.

I joked to someone last Friday that I'll be disappointed if the stock blows up to $600/share next week.

I had a cost basis of less than $10/share. I acquired it decades ago as a penny stock when Avis was close to bankruptcy. They then did a 10 for 1 reverse split to keep the share price above $1 so they wouldn't get delisted.

Here's Monday's trading action.

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/CAR:NASDAQ?hl...

There's a 54% short interest in the stock.


I think what’s happening here is that the short interest is in the hands of a large hedge fund(s) where the position is a very small percentage of assets. So even if they get to where the cover ratio is 10 to 1 or 20 to 1, they have the financial ability to ride it out.

This could be another DELL for somebody. {{ LOL }}

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